Help! My computer is crashing!

[jakesnake8]

Hey folks, this is my first post, and I'm having a bit of an issue.

First, specs.

CPU - i3 2100 w/ stock cooler
MoBo - Gigabyte Z68A-D3H-B3
RAM - 4x2G GSkill Ripjaws 1600 running at stock speed (no O.C.)
GPU - EVGA GTX 550 Ti
PSU - Corsair HX750
Crucial M4 128g running Linux Mint 17 x64 (Primary)
Samsung 840 EVO 120g running WinXP x64 (rarely used)

So I'm having an issue where my computer will power off and reboot every so often. It seems to be mostly random, but happens most often when I'm watching youtube. Sometimes it will go a week or more without happening, sometimes it happens as soon as I open Firefox. It doesn's seem to matter which OS I boot into, which is strange because the only change I made that I can think of before this started was upgraded from Mint 15 to Mint 17. I've tried it with all configurations and quantities of RAM available to me, through both the GPU and Intel HD graphics. I ran Prime95 blend test for 6 hours with no errors. Unfortunately I do not have an extra PSU to test with, but the corsair support rep assured me that Prime95 should load the PSU at least as much as youtube. I've cleaned and re-done the thermal contacs for both the CPU and GPU to no avail, and at this point I'm thoroughly stumped. Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Ultima99]

When you say both GPU and Intel HD you mean you removed the 550?

Is it getting worse over time?

Try Furmark with the 550 and Intel IGP.

Try Furmark + Prime95.

Have you tried Memtest?

How reliably does youtube crash? If you are on youtube in windows using flash and not html5 does it make a difference if you have "Enable Hardware Acceleration" in flash turned on or off?

 

[jakesnake8]

Yes, I removed the 550, in fact it's out now.

It kind of comes and goes, sometimes it happens every time I start a video, sometimes it won't happen for weeks. Right now I can get 10-20 minutes into a video before it crashes.

Is there a Furmark for Linux? I remember running it years ago when the computer was XP only, I'll try to find it again and post back.

I ran Memtest for 12 hours and got no errors.

I never delved deep enough into youtube while running windows to find those, will try those as well. But I did find and disable hardware acceleration while running linux and that had no effect.

 

[jakesnake8]

OK so...
I found, installed and ran Furmark and got a dismal 6 fps, but none of the other modes would run, so I reinstalled the graphics card and fared no better with the open source driver. Hoping for better results before running both Furmark and Prime95 together, I thought I would switch back to nvidia's drivers, which had been working before I took out the card. This is where the fun began.

The computer crashed. On next boot, cinnamon crashed. I tried to switch back to open source drivers. This failed and the computer crashed and wouldn't even let me boot the OS, so I went to linux recovery mode. DPKG caused a crash every time. Enabling network crashed 3 times, but worked on the 4th, so I went to nvidia's site to get 3.04, which is known to work on all versions of linux. It downloaded (at 30 kb/s...grrrrrr) and after many failures I booted to a root terminal in recovery mode to attempt an install. Long story short, I failed, most likely due to inexperience with unix. Fortunately the machine still works as before with the VGA out, so here I am. I fear I may have irreparably broken this install, but thanks to a little foresight and a lot of research, I installed "/" and "/home" to different partitions. So now I'm gonna plop in my Mint 15 disk and start fresh, and if the crashing stops, I'll deal with an old OS until Mint 18, or maybe the next batch of nvidia drivers. Maybe they'll work. Wish me luck, and thank you for your time. I'll post back if/when I have some news.

 

[redrage]

anytime i see random crashes it is usually PSU.